The last remaining Obama advisor who's not a banker -or totally in the banker's pockets- is now bailing... President Barack Obama announced Thursday that former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker was stepping down from his role as head of an outside panel advising the White House on economic policy. ...

OTTAWA—The Canadian economy created 28,000 jobs last month, helped by a gain in part-time jobs to post its third consecutive month of growth.

By comparison, U.S. employers added just 18,000 workers in June, the fewest number in nine months. Expectations by 85 economists surveyed by the Bloomberg news service for overall payroll increases ranged from 40,000 to 175,000.

Statistics Canada said Friday the country's unemployment rate held steady in June at 7.4 per cent as the number of people entering the workforce increased.

The increase in jobs was mainly in the part-time sector, which added 21,000 jobs, compared with 7,000 new full-time jobs.

Economists had expected an overall increase of 10,000 jobs.

BMO deputy chief economist Douglas Porter called the report a small point in favour of the Bank of Canada gradually raising its key interest rate later this year.

“If you blinked, you may have missed the slowdown in Canada's job growth,” Porter wrote in a note to clients.

“While the details of the release may not be as impressive as the sturdy headline, there is no denying that the labour market continues to make impressive progress.”

The Canadian results compared with a gain of just 18,000 jobs in the much larger U.S. economy for June and an employment rate at 9.2 per cent, according to the U.S. Labour Department.

In Canada, the public sector added 51,000 jobs in the month, while there were 22,000 new jobs in the private sector.

However, those gains were offset by a drop of 44,000 in the number of self-employed people in Canada.

The gains were led by the transportation and warehousing industry which saw a gain of 15,000 jobs, while the professional, scientific and technical services sector lost 19,000 jobs.

The construction and manufacturing sectors were little changed for the month.

Ontario, Alberta and Nova Scotia all posted employment gains in June, while Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador saw losses.

Employment was up 40,000 jobs in Ontario following a slight drop in May.

Meanwhile, the news in the U.S. was bleak. Hiring slowed to a near-standstill last month, and employers added the fewest jobs in nine months, as unemployment unexpectedly rose to 9.2 per cent.

The Labor Department said Friday that the economy generated only 18,000 net jobs in June. And the number of jobs added in May was revised down to 25,000.

Businesses added the fewest jobs in more than a year. Governments cut 39,000 jobs. Over the past eight months, federal, state and local governments have cut a combined 238,000 positions.

The latest report offered evidence that the U.S. recovery will be painfully slow. Two years after the recession officially ended, companies are adding fewer workers despite record cash stockpiles and healthy profit margins.

Hiring has slowed sharply in the past two months, after the economy added an average of 215,000 jobs per month in the previous three months.

Economists have said that temporary factors have, in part, forced some employers to pull back. High gas prices have cut into consumer spending. And supply-chain disruptions stemming from the Japan crisis slowed U.S. manufacturing production.

The economy typically needs to add 125,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. And at least twice that many jobs are needed to bring down the unemployment rate.

There are signs that economy could improve in the second half of the year. Gas prices have come down since peaking in early May at a national average of nearly $4 per gallon. Prices averaged $3.59 (U.S.) a gallon nationwide on Friday, according to American Automobile Association.

President Obama insists that our sluggish recovery would've been even worse without his $830 billion "stimulus." Last Friday, the White House released a report purportedly showing that passage of the "stimulus" created up to 3.6 million jobs (even though the economy actually lost 1.8 million jobs since then).

But if Obama's program -- including a 28 percent hike in spending since 2008 and more than $4 trillion in deficits -- worked so well, why has our unemployment rate risen more since those policies were adopted than have the rates of the European Union, South America, Japan, Australia or New Zealand?

Just look north: The recession hit Canada hard. Because its economy and ours are connected, our unemployment rates moved similarly from July 2008 until the "stimulus" passed; both countries' rates were 6.1 percent in August 2008 and rose in lockstep through February 2009, to around 8 percent.

But right after Obama's "stimulus," things changed. Canada greatly outperformed America in creating jobs -- supposedly the whole point of the "stimulus." US unemployment shot up to 10.1 percent and stayed high, remaining above 9.5 percent for almost all of the next 18 months. But Canadian unemployment peaked at 8.7 percent in September 2009 and kept falling. While our latest unemployment rate rose again to 9.1 percent, Canada's has fallen to 7.4 percent.

Before the "stimulus," economic forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal predicted that US unemployment would fall to 8.6 percent by December 2009. Instead, the US rate hit 10 percent. In Canada, it was 8.4 percent.

Why did the US and Canadian rates diverge?

Canada adopted a much smaller and quite different "stimulus" program that emphasized cutting tax rates and regulations and that produced dramatically smaller deficits. On a per-capita basis, Canada's stimulus was about a third that of America's, costing $979 per person compared to our $2,730. The conservative Canadian government chose not to introduce any big programs.

Obama, meanwhile, adopted big-ticket Keynesian programs, believing that government spending for its own sake creates wealth. But Democratic emphasis on "green" energy, government-approved investments and technology and higher salaries for public-school teachers merely moved money away from where Americans and companies would have otherwise spent it.

Obama's stimulus also raised the effective marginal tax rates that some individuals face, discouraging work; Canada, by contrast, cut some marginal rates. Obama kept the corporate tax rate stuck at 35 percent, while Canadians cut their corresponding rate from 21 percent in 2007 to 16.5 percent this year -- with a further cut to 15 percent planned for next year. By last year, Canada had the lowest overall tax rate on business investment of any major industrialized country.

Yes, as often happens during recessions, Canada's revenues fell and its deficit grew. But US net debt as share of GDP will almost double from 2008 to 2012 -- rising from 48 to 81 percent. Canada's net debt will rise by slightly more than 13 points, from 22.4 to 35.8 percent.

Of course, there are other differences in the Canadian and US economies, such as different monetary policies and all the US regulations that forced mortgage companies to make loans that they expected to lose money on. But it is hard to see how those would cause the sudden change in the fortunes of our two economies right after the "stimulus" passed.

Sadly, the effect of Obama's "stimulus" could easily have been foreseen by looking at how labor markets worked. By moving huge amounts of money from one industry to another, the stimulus and all the regulatory changes churned the labor market, and since it takes time for people to move from one job to another, it actually created more unemployment.

Blaming President Bush, as Obama has, just doesn't explain why our economy got worse relative to other countries -- after the current president's policies were adopted.

Members of the Senate received the 154-page bill only three minutes before voting on it, not enough time to actually read it. The bill is full of pork unrelated to fixing the fiscal cliff. It contains $59 million for algae growers, in order to encourage the production of environmentally correct biofuel. Electric motorcycle manufacturers are given a $4 million green energy tax credit, and there is a wind tax credit for $12.1 billion. $430 million is awarded to Hollywood producers to expense up to $15 million of their project costs. Another $70 million in pork is designated for NASCAR, and a rum tax subsidy for Puerto Rican rum makers.